The Fall
by Kiss-Kiss-Kiss-Goodbye
Summary: They spent eight years building their relationship...funny how it only takes three days to destroy it forever. rated T for safety


**A/N: and new story ladies and gents**

**3 days ago…**

I spotted a golden feather on the edge of the concrete platform while I was waiting for the train. I thought of a joke about rats devouring an entire golden pigeon—but there was no one around to share the joke with. A bum slept expertly on a too small bench, a woman pulled herself inward and stood far away, watching her toes, and a very young man gave me a very rough look which I returned, to his blushing embarrassment. I picked up the golden feather, which was on a thin gold chain, but I stayed squatted, close to the edge, leaning my head into the danger zone. I could see all the way to the next station, where the train idled; its headlights like tiger eyes in the tunnel-jungle. I waited there poised, fascinated, as the train approached and the eyes widened. When I finally stood, the woman and the young man were both staring at me baldly. We were all connected, all relieved that I had not jumped. I dangled my feather for them, as if to explain myself—all of this in just a blink of a moment—then the train roared its arrival, doors opened and we stepped into separate cars. It was late, past midnight, and I was headed uptown to clean for a man.

He lived in a penthouse suite of the building overlooking Central Park. There was a doorman whom I had to tell my name and the name of the man I was here to see. I used a made up name for myself, Jadelynn. The doorman introduced himself as Freddy and gave me a wink. He was a light-skinned black man, likely in his fifties.

"You a Goth, little girl?"

"Maybe, what's it to you?"

"Yeah, 'course you are."

On my way to the elevator, Freddy called me back. I stood before him and Freddy made a motion to suggest that I come closer, as what he had to say was only for me to hear, though we were alone in the lobby.

"You line up all the pretty little Goth girls I seen pass through this door headed exactly where you're headed"—Freddy leaned toward me—"you line 'em up and you know what you got?"

I waited.

"What do you think you'd have?"

I let my gaze crawl down to Freddy's crotch, over his little desk, his crumpled sports-car magazine, then slowly back up to his creased face, his smug, mischievous eyes. I looked at him patiently, deliberately.

"You'd have a whole goddamn army of My Chemical Romance freaks!"

I left Freddy to his squawking laughter.

When I got to the apartment, the man instructed me to keep my panties on. The apartment was open and very modern—sixteen foot ceilings and one wall somehow made entirely of glass.

I moved along the window-wall, polishing with ammonia and newspaper. I liked my reflection in the nighttime glass, the way my body was almost translucent, its outline and features only hinted at, and the way the city lights and the black-green hole of the Park were contained within, and spilling out of me. The reflection of my white cotton panties neared opacity, realness, and the gold chain with the golden feather glimmered. The man passed comment on all the usual parts of my body, but the unusual as well—my calves, the notch at the top of my spine. To comment is not necessarily to compliment, we were both aware.

I did not look at him. I looked at me in the window-wall: half disappeared, slim and young. If you don't pretend at vanity, the men feel dissatisfied. Look at my smooth skin; look at my pretty face hidden within this make-up, look at my golden feather!

And then something else, conviction, took over; I am a very good actress. So more than anything I want to say this: in that moment I was happy.

**2 days ago…**

"Explain, Jade, explain," Beck demanded, but he really didn't want me to explain anything.

I had become a monster to him, and he needed me to stay a monster. I kept silent, slowly spinning a sugar packet on the table with the tip of my finger. The waitress was giving us a wide berth—Beck was weeping openly—but I wished she would come and refill my empty cup. I listened to Beck; I watched him cry; I rummaged around inside myself and tried to find a memory, a hurt that would enable me to cry as well. I'd been a bitch, fucked around throughout the long eight years of our relationship. Countless men often, but not always, for money. In penance I wanted to cry for him now. I rummaged and rummaged, but I was dry.

"Explain!"

He smacked the table. A grown man, blubbering like he was, and that black thrift-store oxford with the elbows patched, and his beautiful hair—he looked pathetic. I could perceive us through the eyes of the fat family in the neighboring booth; I could hear the thoughts of the single men, eating alone at the counter, their hunched slabs of backs to us; and the waitress, of course—I had her number—was never going to bring that pot of coffee around again. We looked ridiculous, and Beck looked especially ridiculous. I should have been able to shut off that judgment, that concern for appearances. I should have focused on Beck, only Beck and felt something.

"Come on."

I slipped a twenty out of my pocket and made sure to catch the waitress's eye as I laid it near the edge of the table—twenty dollars for a cup of coffee and being pathetic in an all-night working-class diner in South Brooklyn.

"Explain, explain," Beck whined.

I stood and lifted his ratty old pea coat from the peg.

"Put this on. Wipe your eyes. We're leaving."

I handed Beck his scarf, which he had knitted himself out of sheer boredom one winter, poorly I might add. How proud of it he was, with its garish colors and its holes and its dropped stitches, the inelegance of it all. I had watched him from bed many nights, knitting in the lamp light and playing CDs with our little fat, deaf cat on his lap and I had thought him beautiful, soft, cozy; the same time, there was the dust and clutter and the cat hair, and always the same CDs, scratched in the same places, and I would wonder what had made him so soft, so afraid, so unlike what he used to be…

"Explain, I need you to explain, you bitch."

"Get up. Come on. Enough. I'll walk you home."

There was such a wind, such an icy wind wriggling into every button hole and I had no hat or hood. I was glad for the wind; everyone walked with their faces down, crowns fully forward, hand tucked into their armpits. No one looked at anyone else, or had to be looked at. But I let that wind push and bite into my face, and I looked at the men, even then I looked at all the men.

Our shabby apartment was now his. He did not want to let me up, but I told him it was too cold to explain anything out on the sidewalk.

"Is that a joke? Is this a trick? You tricky little whore. Am I a trick?"

He pushed the key into first one lock then the other. He trembled. I did not want to have sex with him, but I knew he needed me to want to.

Inside, the cat pushed against our legs.

"She missed you."

I thought about picking her up, but I was wearing a black coat and our cat is very white. I took Beck's hand instead and led him towards the bedroom.

"No, not anywhere it ever was before. Here. On the floor."

He opened the bathroom door and pulled on the light bulb's chain.

I needed only to glance at the hexagons of white tile to feel a deep hard coldness in my bones, yet I stripped dutifully, diligently, and laid my bare back against the tile and waited. Beck came back with a condom; we had never used on before, not once.

I laughed.

"Where the hell did you get that?"

"Shut up."

"No, seriously, did you buy that? Already? Already you bought that?"

He put it on. We proceeded. Underneath me the floor somehow grew harder and colder. As we gathered speed, Beck put his hands on my shoulders and lifted me, I thought, for a kiss—we had not yet kissed tonight—but instead he slammed my shoulders back down, and my skull met the floor in a blinding white-noise kind of way. It took a few moments to realize that I was curled on my side, cradling my head, eyes closed. I opened my eyes; Beck was stand in the bedroom doorway, watching me. He looked unwell—shell-shocked, naked, clutching our cat to his chest. He looked very, very unwell.

"I'm O.K., thanks for fucking asking."

He sneered, huffed a crazy laugh, and kicked the door shut.

**Today…**

I locked the doors to the bookstore and cut the music but left the lights on—the whole store suddenly hugely silent, the shelves picked over in need of straightening. I turned the chairs upside down on the café tables and left the empty register drawer hanging open to discourage the curious from putting a brick through the window. In the back, I counted out the till. Once, I stole a hundred dollars in ones and five and how flushed Beck was when I kept pulling bills out of my pockets, and how exasperated. How many jobs had I been fired from, or walked out on, over the years, how many long stretches of jobless-ness? I felt free. Always I'd felt free; Beck had never been fired, never quit abruptly. He worked slavishly for social-justice organizations, kept us in food and cat food, and second hand CDs. People steal, I told him. People lie, people cheat. Except he didn't steal, lie, or cheat.

I was in the back, counting out the till, and the phone rang. I thought it was _him_, I was expecting _him_, any minute, _he_ was the one who was supposed to come and meet me after work, but it was Beck calling, from just outside.

"Poke your head out, you'll see me."

"I'm counting."

"Take a break from counting—geez—poke your head out, let me see you."

"I'll lose my place. Anyway, go home, I told you I had plans."

"Go home? Plans?"

"I told you—Tori. And she just wants me, not us. You know how she gets—she'll wanna get drunk and unload, and you have to work in the morning. And anyway she just wants me, not us. It's not personal, she just feel superior to me, thinks I'm more fucked up than she is, so she can tell me—"

"There's a man out here. On a bicycle."

And I just shut up.

"There's a man looking in the window. He's sitting on a bicycle, looking in the window. And now I want you to tell me the truth. Is he waiting for you?"

"Baby…"

"Unbelievable. Un—fucking—believable!" Beck whispered. And he whispered something else, some other word. Or maybe it was the wind. Then he said, "He looks like a nice guy. You unbelievable slut."

He was not a nice guy, but he knew how to look like one.

We stayed on the phone. I stayed in the back. Beck walked toward the train. The man on the bicycle waited. I pleaded and apologized and pretended I did not want to break up as much as I really did want to break up. All the while I felt such anger; I was so tired of apologizing. Beck was always finding discarded plants and taking them home to regenerate. Everywhere in our apartment there were plants, thriving. This too infuriated me—and when Beck instructed me not to come home that night, when he told me to come by the next day, while he was at work, and remove all my shit and never come home again, I thought of those plants and a space in the world without them.

"It's over," Beck said. "You're free."

**A month later…**

The wind off the river cuts through my t-shirt like blades. The moon dances on the water, it's beautiful enough to make anyone cry. But the scenery isn't why tears are streaming off my face. I threw away everything that meant something to me so that I could be free. Free from responsibility, restraint, and reason. You know what I found? Misery. After Beck left I thought I was happy without him, thought my world was mine again. I was wrong. As the metal I sat on slowly freezes my ass, I think about when we first really got out on our own; the good times in other words.

It was seven years ago, Beck and I had taken jobs as farmhands on a tiny two-acre farm in Virginia—a sloppy, rocky field nestled in the folds of the Blue Ridge Mountains. We drove down non-stop, taking turns behind the wheel. The car was Beck's, some ancient "classic" he'd scrimped for. We'd slowly chug up one side of a mountain, then slide down the other, recklessly, not braking for as long as possible, hollering at our luck, our new found right to do as we damn well pleased and to do it together. We were eighteen years old, both of us, and we loved each other.

At our first truck stop, I stole a pair of driving glasses that had yellow tinted lenses and large black plastic frames. They made the whole world seem as if I was swimming through honey. Beck started on some sensible nonsense about the serious consequences I was gambling with. He speculated about the jails around those parts, the conditions, the prejudice and hostilities of others, but I slipped the glasses on him while he was driving and kissed him on the neck.

"Look."

"Wow, it's beautiful, everything's gold!"

We arrived at night, on the heel of a rainstorm that had sucked away half of the dirt road that led to the farmer's driveway. We kept sinking into little craters filled with water that splashed against the windshield, as if we were driving through a car wash. It took us three tries to find the turn off. It was the best summer I'd ever had. I remember all of it, the tiny shack built into the side of the hill, the day Beck found the little white, runt of a cat that became ours, the night that he became **MY** man.

I remember each and every kiss, every time we made love, every touch, every "I love you."

Then I remember how I hurt him, lied to him, and cheated on him. I remember what it is I'm here to do. I stand, walk to the edge of the bridge and look out over the city.

"I love you Beck, and I'm sorry."

I close my eyes and let myself fall.


End file.
